Sunday 31st May 1998

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Today's Headlines
an Aussie's viewpoint on Australia's first daily Internet newspaper.
Since October 1995

International FHM Magazine rates Pauline Hanson tops

Pauline Hanson has been rated one of the world's sexiest women according to FHM Magazine.

Pauline was voted in the top 100 and, on hearing the news said, "I'm flattered but I take these things with a grain of salt.."

One Nation set to hold the balance of power in Queensland

Support continues to swell for One Nation as the election date approaches. In the latest survey by The Sunday Mail Ian Petersen the One Nation candidate for Gympie, and state deputy leader, led the National Party candidate, Len Stephan by 53% to 47% on a two party preferred basis.

Hervey Bay quote:

Karl Kilian, "I am very disappointed in Borbidge and Beattie - rather than thinking about what they can do for their state, they are more interested in ridiculing each other.

"My wife and I attended the Fraser Coast show in Maryborough and the number of people around the One Nation stand was amazing. I am staggered at the effect Pauline Hanson has had." 

The politics of apartheid
building a divisive Australia

Definition: Apartheid - separateness - laws or policy based on race.

The UN Commission on Human Rights states:

"The people of South Africa clearly demonstrated their commitment to the end of apartheid and the transformation to non-racial democracy by turning out in enormous numbers to vote."

and

The Working Group believes that the process of eliminating apartheid in South Africa is irreversible and that the future generations of South Africans will finally be given the opportunity to live in a society which is free from racism.

Let us remember that Pauline Hanson is being called "racist" by the media and the major parties for arguing that: "The distinction I make is this. A social problem is one that concerns the way in which people live together in one society. A racial problem is a problem which confronts two different races who live in two separate societies, even if those societies are side by side. We do not want a society in Australia in which one group enjoy one set of privileges and another group enjoy another set of privileges."
Extract from Pauline Hanson's Maiden Speech to Parliament on Tuesday 10th September 1996.

Now you will immediately note that Hanson's statement is exactly what the UN Human Rights Commission is saying eliminates apartheid and that "....the people will (therefore) be given the opportunity to live in a society which is free of racism".

In Australia the search by the major parties for minority votes, to quote ALP numbers man Graeme Richardson, "At any cost"... has caused major rifts, divisive and blatantly racist policies to secure marginal seats at election time.

To quote Sheehan in his book, Among the Barbarians, "Barry Jones giving away the game on immigration, 'The handling of immigration by the previous (Labor) government was I'd have to say, less than distinguished. Partly because, I think, immigration was seen as very important - a tremendously important element - in building up a long term political constituency. There was a sense that you might get the Greek vote locked up or, from the other party political points of view, the Chinese vote locked up.

'As a result the idea of bringing groups of people to fulfil family reunion requirements, and so on, was seen at the time as being a real advantage to the party in power at the time.'"

It was under the Labor party that the "Policy of Multiculturalism" flourished. It is by no accident that, today, the great majority of ethnic voters will and have voted Labor Party.

Multiculturalism is based on the policy of apartheid where it is good and acceptable for people of the same race to gather in areas with a community and not to assimilate with other Australians. Like a mini-homeland - another divisive policy much-maligned by Malcolm Fraser who, as an "eminent" person told the South African government in no uncertain terms what he thought about the country's "racist" homelands policy.

This is the same Malcolm Fraser who now walks the lands and opens his grubby little mouth espousing the fallacy that "Hanson and One Nation is racist"...

Yesterday we carried a complete transcript of an article in the Courier Mail about political correctness - another vote catching development born under the Labor party but nurtured under the Coalition.

Today I will give you two real-life examples. The first about "political correctness" and how mainstream Australians are left out of the equation.. The second why the minority and ethnic groups are so vocal in their damnation of Pauline Hanson who would get rid of the divisive and racist inequalities entrenched in our sick mainstream political system.

The first is centered around a letter from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) where they explain to a "white Australian male" why they cannot represent him... and I quote:

"... the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 ("the Act") was enacted to give legislative force to Australia's obligations under the International Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, there are some jurisdictional difficulties associated with a male bringing complaints under the Act...." and "Unfortunately, your complaint does not fit into any of these categories. I am therefore unable to investigate this matter...."

Check out the original scanned HREOC letter here (note we have deleted details of the recipient who registered the bona-fide complaint).

The second relates directly to someone I know very well.

She worked diligently in a part-time roll for the University of Queensland for three years in the lowly position as an Administrative Assistant.

Late last year she was advised that the roll was to be upgraded to full-time because of the new Ipswich Campus. She was told that she would have to apply for the position.

This she did.

She made the shortlist and was interviewed just before Christmas. No one from the university had the decency to inform her that she had been unsuccessful, no letter was written informing her that she had failed in her quest to retain the job. She delayed her trip to Perth to visit her ailing father because the job was supposed to start on 1st January this year.

On the 4th January she accepted that she had missed out and organised the flight to see her father.

When she returned she learnt from contacts within the university of Queensland that her job had been secured by an Asian. (She still has not received an official letter or call advising her that she was unsuccessful). That was fine - equal opportunity - or so she thought.

Turns out the fellow was an absolute dope, could hardly string two words of English together and left the lady wondering what she had to do to get a job and totally disheartened as she felt that she must have been useless.

Bad turns to worse. The successful applicants initial six month probationary period expires next month. The University of Queensland are obviously not too happy with their selection as the position was re-advertised in yesterday's Courier Mail. No one from the university bothered to tell the lady that her old position was being re-advertised.

She bumped into a lecturer by chance yesterday while shopping. This is what she said, "Viv you didn't have a chance of getting that job. The Asian who got it fell into "Category 2 - Ethnic" which meant a massive subsidising of his salary by the government."

Just so that you understand what I am saying here - this lady is a born and bred fourth generation Australian. She has paid taxes all her life. An Asian arrives in Australia immediately gets his job subsidised by the government and the Australian loses the job that she worked in for the past three years. Her income was denied her because of systemic racism working against white mainstream Australia.

This is political correctness... this is divisive, discriminatory and a blight on the corrupt bureaucrats who have through the blessing of career politicians pandered to minority groups who now hold positions of influence in this country.

How migrants fuelled ALP's race to power

By PAUL SHEEHAN AUTHOR OF AMONG THE BARBARIANS

It was inevitable that some of the truth about one of the biggest, most divisive and most costly confidence tricks in Australian political history would come from someone like Barry Jones, an honourable man. He is a clean-skin but also a political insider - a former Federal minister and now president of the Australian Labor Party. On 30 August last year Jones addressed the annual conference of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population. Jones walked to the podium and gave the game away:

"The handling of immigration by the previous Labor Government was, I'd have to say, less than distinguished. Partly because, I think, immigration was seen as very important, a tremendously important, element in building up a long-term political constituency. "There was a sense that you might get the Greek vote locked up or, from the other party-political points of view, you might get the Chinese vote locked up. As a result, the idea of bringing groups of people to fulfil family reunion requirements, and so on, was seen at the time as being a real advantage to the party in power at the time."

The truth was even more brutal. A well-run immigration program was, and is, crucial to Australia's development. But it was also, as Jones said, important in building up Labor's electoral constituency during the 13 years of Labor Federal Government. The family reunion program was central to this strategy. Labor used immigration to re-stock its urban seats with people who would be dependent on government largesse, Labor's largesse.

It worked. The only section of the electorate to hold firm for Labor in the 1996 federal election were the urban electorates with heavy non-English-speaking background (NESB) populations.

Of course, it worked only up to a point. Labor's policy of skewing immigration towards unskilled migrants resulted in pockets of unemployment and welfare dependence at levels not seen since the Depression. The mainstream electorate turned against Labor with a fury, reducing its vote to a rump 38.8 per cent of the primary vote.

Labor's race strategy extended to grassroots politics. The Labor Party in Melbourne is currently embroiled in a ferocious factional war using NESB groups for branch stacking and slush funds to pay for thousands of ALP memberships. A similarly dangerous game is happening in Sydney.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a cynical, dangerous brand of racial politics that flourished during the 13 years of federal Labor Government and is still being played hard by the Labor Party, by One Nation and, to a lesser extent, by the Liberal and National politicians now playing footsy with One Nation in Queensland. It has to be confronted.

Australia survived World War II with a population of little more than 7 million. It was 90 per cent Anglo-Celtic and 99 per cent European. It was another country. In less than three generations, Australia has increased its population by 150 per cent, radically changed its racial and ethnic mix, recognised the central importance of Aboriginal rights and culture, maintained 50 years of economic growth, and kept a remarkably high level of political stability. It should be a time to recognise this achievement. It is not. Public discourse has instead become a drumbeat of discord, division, complaint and blame.

How has the good news become bad? The single most destructive element was the political manipulation of immigration by federal Labor Governments against the wishes of the electorate. A "thought police" was then built to protect this manipulation.

Dr Richard Basham, the head of anthropology at the University of Sydney says: "There are immigration and welfare rackets of all kinds, but it seems that anyone who dares to talk about it is shouted down as a racist."

A former determining officer with the Department of Social Security, who asked that his name be withheld, resigned after deciding the system tolerated welfare abuse under Labor.

"The abuse was extensive; it was upsetting. I resigned on principle," he told me. "The system is biased in favour of people who lie. Most of the people I saw were hard-working people, survivors, opportunists. They regarded the social security system as a source of income, not a safety net . . ."

"Local staff are not supposed to imply that any particular ethnic group are disproportionately accessing the system. The department discourages the compilation of such statistics. They say it breaches the non-discriminatory ethic of the department."

The Department of Social Security confirmed that this was true. But the department's official figures also confirm the anecdotal information given to me by two former Social Security officers. The figures show stark disparities in welfare dependence between immigrant streams, with some showing chronic rates of dependence.

There was plenty for the Howard Government to get its teeth into when Labor lost office. The welfare system was more porous than Labor claimed. So was the immigration system.

Dr Bob Birrell, of Monash University, says spouse migration was the largest component of the immigration program under Labor, and the most abused. "There are 120,000 marriages a year in Australia and an astonishing proportion of these, about 30 per cent, involved offshore spouses," Birrell says. "A substantial number of these people went straight to the social security system."

The porous welfare and immigration systems were supplemented by direct payments to ethnic organisations. Des Moore, a former deputy secretary of the Treasury and now director of his own think-tank in Melbourne, the Institute of Private Enterprise, estimates that in Labor's last full year in office, the Federal Government spent at least $143 million in direct grants to ethnic communities. Ninety-seven per cent of these grants went to organisations in Labor electorates.

To distract scrutiny from this, Labor has systematically played the race card. A classic example occurred this month when the Nine Network's Sunday program was about to expose ethnic branch stacking in Melbourne. Before the program went to air, Sunday received a warning from the ALP:

"Based on the information we have received, your program . . . has created the impression within some branches of the ALP that it is acting in a politically biased, if not racist, way and the ALP State Office has been asked to consider whether there have been breaches of racial discrimination and privacy laws."

The letter was signed by John Landers, State secretary of the Victorian ALP. The threat was real enough. The ability to accuse people of racism was the final, crucial, element in Labor's race strategy. Under Australia's plethora of anti-discrimination laws, a large bureaucratic machinery exists to process accusations of racism.

The politicised culture of these bureaucracies has created a climate of insidious inhibition and censorship.

The key watchdog is the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, whose annual reports read like political manifestos. It is a busy media player. The commission issues media guidelines, handles complaints against the press and presents its own media awards. All of the commissioners in place when Labor lost office were regarded as political appointees and are being replaced by the Howard Government as their terms expire.

The Human Rights Commission complements the work of the various state anti-discrimination, equal-opportunity and privacy commissions. These commissions in turn complement the state-funded Ethnic Affairs Councils and Ethnic Affairs Commissions. These councils and commissions are highly sensitive to immigration matters. They are not shy in making accusations of discrimination or racism.

These accusations have been used so much that historian and immigration scholar Dr John Atchison, of the University of New England, was moved to write last year about the "latent fascism" in the constant depiction of political opponents as racists. This technique was described last year with ruthless clarity by the Macquarie University anthropologist, Professor Kenneth Maddock:

"What we are seeing in Australia is a struggle for the high moral ground using the method anthropologists call the politics of embarrassment. The aim is to soften up your opponents by making them feel bad about themselves or their ancestors. This puts them in a mood to make concessions."

Paul Sheehan is a senior writer for The Sydney Morning Herald. This piece is adapted from his book, Among The Barbarians, published by Random House.


Making the news" -
an indepth exposé of media and political collusion at the highest possible levels in Australia.


email the editor

You say:

Subject: Peter Sellers

I was most distraught to see Graham Strachan compare Malcolm Fraser to the great Peter Sellers. Peter Sellers does not deserve to be maligned in this way.

Brett Hocking

Subject: political alternatives

Dear sir,

Perhaps you should rename the "Poor Laurie Oates" letter "The Two Lauries". I don't want to sound as if I have any sympathy for that toad.
---------------------------------------------

The Liberal-Labor Party has only itself to blame for the rise and rise of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party. In our system of government, a party or coalition of parties forms government, and the opposition's duty is to provide an alternative. But over the past few goverments, Liberal and Labor, there has been no opposition on important social and economic matters. Both parties are committed to such absurdities as homosexual marriages. Both parties are committed to economic globalisation.

On most issues - the economy, family policies - people will naturally differ in their views. So it is perfectly natural that a third voice should arise to reflect the concerns of people who disagree with the Liberal-Labor Party. In fact, the lack of a party like One Nation would prove that we are a nation of political sheep.

But we're not sheep. And that has frightened them into increasingly desperate fear-mongering. Too late. They have so abused the word 'racist' by now it has no meaning for most people. Apparently it means anybody who disagrees with the Labor Party and the idiots of the chattering classes, secular and religious.

Antonia Feitz

Subject: Congratulations

Our congratulations for fielding such an extensive team.

We totally support what you represent, and if what I heard around the streets of Brisbane when I was down there over the last couple of days is any indication, so do a lot of other ordinary people who have had enough of the tap-dancers and the hand-wavers, who service themselves first and last, and others later.

It is a sick society that neglects its old and its young: ingratitude on the one hand, and selfishness on the other.

Someone with tremendous integrity needs to take on the international interests that are seeking to appropriate Australia's future to suit themselves. Under Labor , we were being progressively sold out, notably by our prior "best treasurer in the world": the sin was not so much an act of treason, as an act of hypocrisy that such action represented, given that the perpetrators were the very people that were supposed to represent the interests of the ordinary man and woman. The current government has had to totally direct its energies into defusing the bombs that " the best treasurer" left behind, and has become compromised in the process.

We are Christians and want no truck with nations run by murderers and criminals - if that includes half of our near neighbours, so be it. This country still unites under a flag that contains the crosses of three Christian saints: perhaps Oz has to be uncompromisingly reminded of that, before it, too, suffers the fate of those who persecute ordinary people who look only to obtain the type of social justice that Christ himself epitomised. Let us remember that the God of our childhood is the one who looks after the widow and the fatherless, and be grateful for what we have had so far.

Ian Turton

Subject: Pauline Hanson

She is entitled to a "fair go', just like the rest of you. Her views are not to be dismissed and if more people stopped and really listened to what she is really saying we might have a chance of a better and more equitable future for all "fair minded Australians" I am thoroughly sick and tired of the "bending backwards" (to show aboriginals in particular) that we are fair. They are getting away with blue bloody murder and we are so afraid of being called bigots that we turn a blind eye. In the name of God, get it right and give Pauline, and the rest of us a fair go.

Mary Strid

Subject: FREE SLOGANS FOR ELECTION

MULTICULTURAL ONE NATION YES!!!

MULTI NATIONS DESCRIMINATION NO!!!

For the Chinese electorates, isn't it disgusting that we have them?

CHINESE AUSTRALIANS YES!!!
CHINESE NATIONALISTS NO!!!

ETHNIC AUSTRALIANS YES!!!
ETHNIC NATIONALISTS NO!!!

no charge. Philip .

Personal trivia, from the global office:

Off to Gympie today....

Another perfect day in paradise.

Have a good one.


Recent stories exclusive to  (how to) subscribe/rs of the Australian National News of the Day:

Taking on News Limited at the Australian Press Council in Sydney.- 23rd May 1998
Launch of One Nation's Queensland leadership.- 22nd May 1998
Protest over closure of National Australia Bank branch in Ipswich - 21st May 1998
Pauline Hanson meets the people of Blair
- 20th May 1998
Unethical trifecta expose Courier Mail's intellectual prostitutes - 9th May 1998
MIGA - son of MAI exposed - 8th May
Just me and Pauline
- 5th May
One Nation breakfast - 4th May
Just who are the Mont Pelerin Society - 3rd May
The Internet and the DEATH of the MAI - 30th April  
Launch of Pauline Hanson's re-election campaign - 29th April  
Second One Nation protest surprises Bob McMullan - 28th April  
Sultan of Brunei buys up big tracks of Australia - then negotiates Indonesian "settlements" 25th April
Maritime Union of Australia win in the Federal Court 22nd April


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